Wednesday, June 25, 2014

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On Friday the 6th of June 2014, I wandered along to
the Pat Collins Reading Room at Waterman House, Hill St., Belfast to listen to the
magnificent Dr Rowan McLaughlin speak about prehistory in Ulster. Specifically, he
was intent on tackling the impact that data from excavations in the last decade-and-a-half
have had on our understanding of prehistory in Ulster and Ireland generally. The
MRB have been running a pretty excellent lecture series over the last while and
have a full schedule of speakers lined up until the end of 2014 (here).
I’ve not been to any of these before, but I felt that I wanted to make a
special effort for this speaker. Many years ago Rowan and I used to work
together in the commercial field archaeology sector. While he’d often be
relatively quiet in the site hut, he was certainly worth listening to once he
started to speak. If he was giving a lecture, it would – most likely – be well
worth the attention paid. I’ve not seen him in a few years and it was lovely to
catch up in the few minutes before the lecture kicked off. I was, however,
rather discomfited when one of his first remarks to me was: ‘are you going to
write this up for your blog?’ Staying my hand from reaching for my notepad and
pencil, I attempted to appear non-committal as I asked ‘would you like me to?’
He appeared to think about it for a moment and said ‘well … yes’. Everything
hinged on that ‘yes’ and the post below is my attempt to convey Rowan’s
research in a clear an intelligible manner. If I’ve misunderstood or erred in
any way from the original delivery, I apologise to both the lecturer and you
the reader.

Rowan did his PhD on dental microwear analysis and
has worked at Queen’s University Belfast as part of the INSTAR Cultivating Societies project.
He began with the deceptively simple statement that he wanted to talk about
prehistory and how we go about turning all the data generated through the
excavation of archaeological sites and the pattern of sites in the landscape into
knowledge about past societies. Without any written records from these times,
archaeology is the only means of enquiry we have. With this in mind, it did
seem a little odd when his first choice of image was the planet Saturn. As a
slightly nervous ripple of laughter from the audience subsided, he explained
that the planet had absolutely nothing to do with Irish prehistory, but that it
does neatly illustrate some ideas about how information about distant things is
acquired and how that data is transformed into knowledge. Although he started with
a recent, detailed image of Saturn taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, he noted that while
the ancient Greeks knew about the existence of various planets in our solar
system, they understood them solely as star-like objects that shifted position and
‘wandered’ in relation to the
other stars. In 1610, when Galileo Galilei pointed
his telescope at the night sky to observe Saturn he was unsure of what he saw
and was unable to rationalise and comprehend its rings. The planets he knew –
Earth, the Moon, Jupiter etc. – did not have rings around them, so nothing in
his experience could have prepared him for what he was observing. He
incorrectly identified the rings as close-orbiting moons. To make the matter
more complex, the plane of the rings changes, so when Galileo examined Saturn a
year later, the ‘moons’ appeared to have disappeared … and then reappeared
sometime later. Galileo, unable to comprehend what he saw, described it as a
mysterious planet that appeared to grow and shrink over time. In 1655, Huygens
came along with a slightly better telescope and more systematic analysis of the
heavens. He was able to determine that Saturn does appear to be surrounded by
ring-like material. These advances were again built on by Cassini in 1676 –
again with a slightly better telescope – was able to confirm the existence of
the rings and even map out various features of those rings, including what is
now termed the ‘Cassini
Division’ between the inner and outer bands (have a look here for a good run down
on the subject). McLaughlin’s point here is that with better resolution – when
we have better instruments to measure these remote things – we discover more
information, and produce more date, and that this becomes ever more refined and
better resolved. There comes a point along this process, where enough
information has been accrued to allow you the opportunity to understand the
reality of the situation. He points out that, given the relatively modest
increases in telescope quality, Galileo could
have understood the rings of Saturn had he the correct preconceived notion as
to what he was looking at. As McLaughlin says: ‘so it is with planetary
astronomy, and so it is with archaeology.’ We cannot directly view the past –
in the same way as the naked eye cannot see surface details on distant worlds.
But through archaeological research and study – especially of chronological
data – you can make observations of this distant time. At this point McLaughlin
provided a brief primer on radiocarbon dating and calibration. I don’t propose
to repeat it verbatim here, but instead will direct the interested reader to
some of my own writings on the topic (which, in any event, were heavily
influenced by numerous conversations and correspondence with Rowan: here | here
| here
| here
| here).
To illustrate the gulf between the precision that may be gained from
radiocarbon dating and the archaeological record itself, McLaughlin put up a
slide with a calibrated radiocarbon date on one side and an image of a
partially-excavated Bronze Age cist
grave on the other. He explained that the individual pictured died and was
buried. No doubt, they were mourned and seen as a loss to their community. In
all likelihood, this happened within a relatively short period – more than
days, but certainly within the scale of weeks, months and a small number of
years. And slowly, slowly, the evidence and memory of that person began to fade
away. When we come to radiocarbon date this individual, however, the best we
can say is that this individual lived and died (in this particular instance)
between 2100 and 1900 cal BC. His argument here is that this is pretty good –
if you know nothing about Irish prehistory. On the other hand, it’s very bad if
you want to put what happened in the past into precisely the right order, so
that an understanding is gained of how societies changed over time.

Over the last decade-and-a-half or so has seen a
vast increase in the volume of archaeological data that has been produced. Much
of this is the result of economic circumstances, where development-led
excavations have been carried out in advance of construction. Many of these
were carried out during the Celtic Tiger years, in advance of major
infrastructural works such as roads, pipelines, quarries, and residential
developments. In a perfect world, the excavations get written up and get stored
in archives as ‘grey
literature’ ... some even get published. McLaughlin estimates that over the
last ten years alone some one million pages of new data for the island of
Ireland have been written down. Rowan’s approach to the ‘data mountain’ has
been centred on extracting an understanding of chronology from this mass of
data, a task he describes as ‘the golden cord to lead out of the labyrinth’. An
examination of all the available radiocarbon dates for Irish prehistory that
were available in around 2001, shows that there were 1396 known from both
published and grey literature sources. Plotting all of these out gives an
indication of what prehistory is ‘like’ at this point. As may be expected,
there are relatively few sites dating to the earliest periods and more sites
from more recent times and a slow but gradual increase in between. This has led
to a view of the prehistory of Ireland where there was an initial colonisation
during the Mesolithic (c.10k cal BP) and
that this was a relatively stable hunter-gatherer way of life until the
introduction of agriculture (c.6k cal
BP). After this point we see a population explosion that goes hand in hand with
increasing social and religious complexities. From this point on we can witness
communities evolving and adapting these beliefs and practices, until it reaches
its final developed flourishing of civilization in more recent times. As he
says: ‘The problem with that view is that it is entirely wrong. It’s not what
the archaeological data actually indicate.’ He sees that this discovery has
been the big achievement of development led/commercial archaeology in Ireland
since the millennium. He then turned to another histogram of 4928 dates from
prehistoric Ireland that have become available in the time since 2001.Instead
of a gradual increase, there are peaks and troughs in activity. At some times
it appears that there were significant episodes of large-scale archaeological
deposition, and this contrasts with periods of seemingly little activity. To
understand the reality of what we’re seeing here, there are a number of ideas
that must be kept in mind. Firstly, all the dates must be calibrated as we
cannot directly compare this archaeological data with environmental evidence from
various regions. The other issue is the degree of bias in how these data points
were collected. Obviously, the first bias is where excavations take place –
either dictated by individuals’ research interests, or where development is
planned. Further biases exist in the systematic approach that archaeologists
use in the collection of this data. For example, there are certain types of
features that are more likely to be dated over others – what McLaughlin
describes as features that are ‘more juicy looking’ and, thus, more likely to
be dated. Indeed, certain types of sites are almost completely ignored and this
is an ongoing issue.

The Neolithic is an enduring focus of world
prehistory. It is the period of human existence where we abandoned the
hunter-gatherer approach and took on – to a greater or lesser extent –
agriculture, along with various forms of religious beliefs and structures of
social organisation that led to this proliferation of archaeological remains.
He showed a slide of Creggandevesky
court tomb in County Tyrone, arguably one of the best examples of a Neolithic
monument in Ireland. During the Neolithic there is evidence for a significant
number of these sites being constructed across the northern half of Ireland. At
the same time, other forms of megalithic tomb were being constructed, including
Portal Tombs (e.g. Legananny,
Co. Down) and at least two of the earliest Passage tombs were constructed
during the Early Neolithic (Carrowmore,
Co. Sligo and Baltinglass,
Co. Wicklow). However, the real dividend of all the development-led excavation
over the last couple of decades has been the proliferation of newly discovered
settlement sites from this period. Prehistoric settlement has, until recently,
been difficult to find, leaving our understanding of prehistoric lives and
societies incomplete. For McLaughlin, though he does admit to being biased, the
single most important question in Irish archaeology is currently: ‘when did the
Neolithic period start?’ The ‘orthodox’ date that’s found in most of the text
books and on the informational signage at the sites is c. 4000 BC. McLaughlin suggests that one factor in its adoption is
that it’s a nice round number that’s easy to remember … but, however you wish
to view it, it’s just not the correct date! Instead he points to evidence such
as the first domesticates arriving in Ferriter’s
Cove, County Kerry, at 4300 cal BC. Confusingly, there are at least three
or four Mesolithic sites with securely dated contexts that show that this
lifestyle was still extant at 3900 cal BC. Thus, we appear to have a 400 year
period where we have both Neolithic and Mesolithic economies running in
parallel. Turning to the court tombs, such as Creggandevesky mentioned above,
McLaughlin notes that until recently their chronology has been ‘somewhat
elusive’. However, following a dating programme directed by Rick Schulting (and incorporating Bayesian modelling),
it is now clear that their first phase of use was between 3700 and 3570 cal BC.

So … developer-led excavations have revealed a
large number of settlement sites, and in the Early Neolithic these are in the
form of rectangular structures. Many of these are comprised of large post-holes
and significant wall-slot gullies deeply cut into the natural subsoil. For this
reason, nothing short of a bulldozer is really capable of erasing them from the
landscape. Following from this, many examples of this form of site have been
discovered and, in turn, have become an enduring focus of research for well
over a decade. Work by the likes of Jessica Smyth and Cormac
McSparron, among others, has revealed much of the detail about domestic
life in the Neolithic. This has come through myriad analyses of deposited
soils, the surviving cereal grains, and the few sites that have produced the
bones of domesticated animals. From this work, we can now see the Early
Neolithic in terms of an economic landscape devoted to cereal farming and
cattle husbandry. Other recent work, on the absorbed lipids
in pottery, has shown that the secondary products from these animals were
also used, including dairying as well as for meat.

Taken together, the corpus of radiocarbon dates
from Early Neolithic sites indicate that it began after 4000 cal BC. McLaughlin
showed a graph depicting the summed probability of all the available
radiocarbon dates. As such, it provides a necessarily rough and imprecise idea
of what the known archaeological activity was like at this time. However, he is
quick to note that the statistical justification for this approach is not proven
and is still under debate. Nonetheless, it is a simple means of creating a
general overview of activity and observing times when activity was particularly
high. He notes that the Early Neolithic rectangular houses cause an incredible
peak in activity at around 3700 cal BC. Although it appears to start slightly after
4000 cal BC, this is misleading owing to the ‘old wood effect’ where the
radiocarbon dated charcoal may be from heartwood, several centuries older than
the event being examined. This form of signal is particularly pronounced at the
start of the Neolithic as many of these houses were built of timbers felled in
the primeval forest. These large, ancient trees thus enter the archaeological
record, eventually entering the samples, and influencing the radiocarbon dates.
His next image showed the same graph, with all the dates from charcoal removed,
and only the shorter lived samples being represented. These included cereal
grains, hazelnut shells, and bones. While the latter have a greater own age,
and contain material which exchanged carbon with the atmosphere several years
past, it is nowhere near as extreme as the issue posed by the dating of
heartwood charcoal. When examining the evidence provided by the short-lived
samples, McLaughlin notes that the ‘Neolithic House Horizon’ begins at around
3750 cal BC. Using Bayesian statistics to model the available short-lived
samples from Neolithic houses allows the positing of defined start and end
dates to this activity. Various researchers, including McSparron (2008),
Whitehouse et al. (2013), and Cooneyet al. have examined this and have all
produced estimations of when exactly this ‘house horizon’ began and ended. Based
on this work, we can now say (with c.95%
certainty) that this phase began in the period from 3720 to 3680 cal BC, and
ended between 3640 and 3620 cal BC. In human terms, this equates to a period of
between one and five generations – not a particularly long time! McLaughlin
notes that the application of Bayesian models allows some impressive
improvements in the standard calibrated chronologies. While the majority of the
evidence points to the genesis of the Neolithic around 3700 cal BC, a small
number of sites show evidence of slightly earlier activity at around 3800 cal
BC, including Poulnabrone portal tomb, Co. Clare. When we take a more detailed
look at the radiocarbon dates from Neolithic houses and plot them all together
and compare it to the dates provided by the Bayesian model of the ‘house horizon’ it is clear that the
short-lived samples all converge around 3700 cal BC. However, if we examine the
charcoal samples they are all earlier. McLaughlin notes that this distribution
of dates is bimodal – i.e. it has two
peaks. One is just after 3900 cal BC and the other dates to a little after 3800
cal BC. Such a bimodal distribution can be taken to imply that there were two
separate sets of activities in operation, rather than just a single form of
activity. To McLaughlin, this earlier phase of charcoal dates relates to the
old wood trees used to build the Neolithic houses. He interprets the post-3800
cal BC spike as dates from younger wood, including sapwood and twigs that were
being burnt in and around the houses. He suggests that, in his personal
opinion, the short lived samples (primarily cereals and hazelnuts) are evidence
for the last phase of use for these structures. To his mind, these short lived
samples do not represent a phase of use of the sites, but in fact the evidence
of their destruction. What we are seeing in the end of the Early Neolithic is
the sudden disappearance of this type of rectangular house from the
archaeological record. He describes it as ‘an apocalypse … it was a caprice
that transcended local circumstances. It happened all through Ireland and
suddenly we find that these structures were abandoned … pretty much forever’.
He notes that there is one Neolithic house in County Carlow that has a burial
in the middle of it that dates to approximately a century later. But this
example aside, he sees no evidence that they were revisited in any meaningful
way. McLaughlin argues that, better than any form of Bayesian analysis, if we
accept that this abandonment was a single event rather than a more drawn-out
process, we stand a reasonable chance of directly dating this event. As an
illustration, he explained that the laws of probability indicate that if an
individual repeatedly fires arrows at a single target, and all other variables
being equal, the average of where those arrows land will be the bulls-eye … you
just need enough arrows. As it happens, we do have enough arrows – in the form
of many hundreds of dates from Neolithic sites. By looking at where the average
of these dates lie we can date – with remarkable precision – the ‘house
apocalypse.’ He has plotted the modal dates (i.e. the point of a calibrated radiocarbon date where the
probability it dated to a given year was the highest) as a frequency
distribution. The resulting graph shows a particularly noticeable peak at 3652
cal BC. As he says: ‘I think there was an apocalypse in the Neolithic in 3652
BC’. Admittedly, this is a relatively new statistical technique that is
currently unaccepted by the archaeological establishment. McLaughlin calls the
technique Computed Radiocarbon Average Probability, though he suggests that it
may be better referred to by its initials.

From all this, McLaughlin reckons that we’ve got a
Neolithic that kicks off around 3800 cal BC, but doesn’t get into its full
flourishing, in terms of deposition of materials, until about a century or so
later. Drawing inspiration from Ray Mears’
latest TV show, How the Wild West was Won, he
observes how the North American forests are known to have been cleared as part
of the westward migration of people. In the 17th and 18th centuries was a
specialist class of men who went forth into the wilderness, chopped down the
trees, built farmsteads … but didn’t actually do anything with them. It was
only when a second wave of settlers came along, they sold the freshly cleared
land and cabins to the new arrivals as readymade farms. Clearing the Neolithic
primeval forest using only stone tools would have been a hugely difficult
undertaking, but McLaughlin notes that there may be evidence for this early
forest clearance in the bimodal distribution of the radiocarbon dates. At this
point he mentions one of his heroes, Dick Proenneke, the
amateur naturalist who built a log cabin in the remote Twin Lakes region of
Alaska. Across the world, where anthropological and historical records exist,
the evidence shows that people living in heavily forested environments build
rectangular houses from logs – the readymade availability of substantial
timbers just appears to be readymade for converting into rectangular houses! Thus,
when people stop building in this way it suggests to McLaughlin that they had
simply run out of trees – the primeval forest had been cut down and a farmed,
managed landscape replaced it.

If we plot all the known Early Neolithic houses,
it is clear that there is a predominantly easterly distribution in Ireland.
This is, in part, itself an artefact of the areas in which recent development
has occurred and where development-led excavations have been undertaken. However,
the distribution of contemporary megalithic monuments is generally towards the
west. This too is probably quite biased as there has been less modern
settlement and development to degrade and destroy these upstanding monuments outside of the major urban centres.
Even accounting for these various forms of bias and distortion of the record,
McLaughlin argues that distinct regional variations may be noted. For example,
there is a distinct preference for megalithic tombs in the northern half of
Ireland, and along the valley of the River Barrow, stretching
from Waterford harbour to Dublin harbour. When this is plotted against where
development-led excavations have discovered Early Neolithic settlements, there
is a noticeable overlap. Examples include the vicinity of what McLaughlin terms
‘Derry-squiggle-Londonderry’ (though I believe it may be more appropriate in
this context to go for Derry±London), the Antrim coast, Dundalk harbour, and
along the ‘Barrow corridor’. Looking at what type of sites are being
constructed, in the north there are court tombs and rectangular houses, while
in the south-east there are portal tombs and rectangular houses. In the
south-west – which until relatively recently wasn’t thought to have a Neolithic
at all [see: here]
– just has rectangular houses. McLaughlin suggests that we’re only now
beginning to get a sense of the different superposition of depositions going on
in prehistory, even if we’re not yet at a point where we can satisfactorily
explain what it all means. He says that a major change happened at around 3600
cal BC – or at around 3652 cal BC if you follow his C.R.A.P. model. At this
time the Neolithic houses suddenly fell into disuse and, instead, deposition
happened at pit complexes and similar sites. These are spreads of material that
don’t make particularly interesting looking (‘juicy’) sites, which has led to
relatively few of them being radiocarbon dated. He showed a map of sites that
haven’t been dated but might be of
this period and argues that they appear to be relatively widespread across the
Island. Added to this are a small number that have been dated. From these sites
we get a picture, though one that is necessarily more ephemeral owing to the
lack of data, of a Neolithic economy that is largely unchanged from the
preceding, Early Neolithic. He pointed to one particular dot in the vicinity of
Larne, looked at me and asked ‘is that Ballyboley?’
This was an absolute pig of a site that I directed in 2004 to 2005 … just a
giant, unending series of pits and random postholes that took forever to
excavate and I still can’t explain what’s going on. One of the reasons I can’t
explain what happened there was that the post-excavation never progressed
beyond a basic stratigraphic report and the thousands of decorated sherds of
pottery and flint tools have never been examined and professionally analysed.
Just to give one clue as to the extraordinary wealth of this site: there was
one feature that looked utterly un-special … an amorphous blob about a metre
wide and perhaps two metres long. Two guys were sent off to clean it up and one
took one side and one took the other. I came over to find that although they
were just giving it a light trowel down, the feature was so incredibly rich
that they were able to play a game of ‘who’s found the most hollow scrapers?’ …
if memory serves, the final score was something like 8 to 7, and that wasn’t
even the richest feature. A further point, if slightly tangential, is that
although this was a ‘development-led’ excavation the samples were processed for
free at QUB as a training exercise for students of various grades, and the
radiocarbon dates were also done as part of the INSTAR Cultivating Societies
project. That aside, McLaughlin was able to tell me (and the assembled
audience) that the radiocarbon dates from the site show that it’s the latest
Early Neolithic site to produce cereals. Anyway … returning to the pits … he
showed just what one of these typical pits looks like in excavation …
unimpressive, uninspiring, frequently lacking in artefacts, and unlikely to
have the expense of a radiocarbon date lavished on it.

Turing to the types and numbers of features that
have been dated, it can easily be seen that there are a very large number of
these pit and spread complexes in comparison to, say, rectangular houses.
Although the data in the graph is slightly out of date, it still serves to
illustrate the general point that although there were three times as many pit
complexes as rectangular houses, a very large percentage of the houses have
been dated (74%), in comparison to the pits (34%). This is thrown into even
more stark relief when we look at it in terms of those sites whose chronology
we have a good understanding of. A significant proportion of the rectangular
houses have well understood chronologies (48%), while only 10% of pit and
spread complexes are comprehended with the same degree of precision and
clarity. Indeed, other site types have, as Rowan states, ‘similarly diabolical
levels of understanding associated with them.’

Known

Dated

Good Chronology

Early Enclosure

4

3

2

Rectangular house

54

40

26

Other enclosure & timber circles

55

17

7

Neolithic pits & spreads

159

54

16

Burnt mounds

7

7

3

Court tombs

398

12

4

One of the good things about working with
calibrated radiocarbon years is that we may compare the patterns we see with archaeological
signals from other regions, with tree-ring data, with ice-cores etc. These allow us to gain
understandings of past climate and environment. Phil
Barratt of QUB has been working to re-examine every available prehistoric
palaeoenvironmental study from Ireland. One of his objectives is the seeking
out of potential environmental events that correlate with the information in
the archaeological record. One of his areas of study relates to the ‘Plantago Gap’. Plantago lanceolata (ribwort) is a weed
that grows in association with arable farming. Thus, we can identify points in
time where arable farming was especially important by the amount of ribwort
pollen recovered from environmental samples. However, there is a period in the
Middle Neolithic, after 3500 cal BC and before 2500 cal BC where pollen from
the ribwort simply disappears from the record. The implication is, of course,
that the importance of cereals diminished during this period. This is backed up
by the archaeological record itself, where cereal grains also cease to be found
between these dates. One of the challenges facing this form of analysis is the
difference in scales of resolution between the fine grained chronology that can
be achieved in the archaeological record and the much less precise one of the
environmental data. The Middle Neolithic period simply doesn’t have all that
many identified settlements and the pollen record does seem to indicate that
arable agriculture just stopped. Despite the monitoring and excavation of
literally thousands of sites across Ireland, there is remarkably little
well-dated, secure evidence of settlement sites in the period from c.3400 cal BC to c.3300 cal BC. However, there are plenty of passage tombs – arguably,
the most famous of all Neolithic monuments. These give an insight into the
period where sites like Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth, etc. are large-scale, well-constructed monuments with art and
astronomical alignments etc. and
carefully placed in the landscape, but almost all evidence of domestic activity
is absent [see also a review of a lecture by Robert Hensey: here].
As McLaughlin says: ‘There are no settlement sites. In fact the only thing we
can really get at of day-to-day life is by looking at the human remains
themselves, which are actually quite few and far between.’ Where these remains
have been examined, it appears that there is little difference between them and
other people at different times in the Neolithic, certainly in terms of what
they were eating. Nonetheless, we still have no real idea as to how the highly
ritualised and organised forms of behaviour that produced the Passage tombs
related to day-to-day life. Acknowledging the old chestnut that ‘absence of evidence
does not equal evidence of absence’, McLaughlin proposes that one solution
to this issue may lie in a form of nomadic pastoralism, perhaps similar to that
experienced by the modern Qashqai
in Iran. Part of their lifestyle includes the herding and movement of large
herds of domesticated animals by relatively small, but highly mobile,
communities. Coming from this approach, McLaughlin sees the possibility of
Passage tombs being located prominently in the landscape – on hills and ridges
– where they were points in an annual cycle. In this way, the annual journey of
the kin group intersected in significant ways with the annual journey of the
spirits/ancestors. However, as McLaughlin wryly observes: ‘Archaeological
theory really does reach is full flourishing when you don’t actually have any
raw data.’

In the Late Neolithic we have plenty of data and
we see a return to site deposition. One of the styles of pottery that becomes
popular in Ireland at this time is ‘grooved ware’, a flat-based
or ‘bucket shaped’ form, introduced from Orkney. In terms of sites, we see the
introduction of large earthen henges.
While we can’t currently see it with chronological precision, it does appear that
the introduction of henges was a relatively sudden occurrence. Unfortunately,
this point is just at one of the ‘wiggles’ in the calibration curve for
radiocarbon dates, making it difficult to gain precise dates and insights. As
McLaughlin says ‘It does seems like a large number of people sprang out of the
ground in the Late Neolithic.’ Similarly, the environmental evidence from these
sites indicate that there is a return to cereal cultivation and animal
husbandry.

In the Beaker period we see the
development of wedge
tombs (a uniquely Irish development) and burnt mounds (known from
all over northern Europe, but especially found in Ireland). If we look at the
numbers of these burnt mounds known versus those dated, we see that some 75
have been discovered and excavated, but only four have been particularly well
dated. This is in strong contrast with cist burials, 40 of which have
been excavated and dated, of which 35 may be described as having a well
understood chronology. Beaker pottery arrives in Ireland around 3260 cal BC and
has died out by 2200 cal BC. This is of interest as the same pottery forms
continue on in Britain until 1800 cal BC, so whatever was happening in Early Bronze
Age Ireland caused Beakers to fall into disuse – perhaps Ireland got more
insular more quickly at this time. Many of the cist burials have been
discovered as part of agricultural works and, because they were so obviously a
stone box containing bones, they were more frequently recorded and at least the
artefacts saved. Through the work of certain researchers, the chronology is
particularly well understood and they are now known to have been in use from
2200 cal BC to 1800 cal BC. In terms of the Early Bronze Age, we have burnt
mounds (that are created and used across the whole period), wedge tombs that
date to the start of the period, and cists that essentially date to its end …
or at least ‘the end of the middle part of the Early Bronze Age’. If we analyse
the distribution of radiocarbon dates from these cist burials, we find that in
the south of the island they appear at around 2170 cal BC and move into the
northern portion of the island around 2110 cal BC. Because so many of these
burials have been so well dated, we can see genuine demographic patterns in the
data. McLaughlin says ‘we can see these Early Bronze Age people that brought
with them the insular pottery style, the cist burial tradition – they appeared
in the south of the island and they moved north.’ If all classes of prehistoric
monuments were as well dated as the cist burials, it would simply revolutionise
our understanding of those times.

In the final section of the lecture, McLaughlin
ventured into the quagmire that is suggesting population numbers at various
times in Irish prehistory. While it is not an easy topic to tackle, it is one
that is frequently asked by the public, and is one that deserves a thoughtful
answer. He began with a graph of radiocarbon dates from North America,
explaining that in such a large landmass the relatively localised demographic and economic
changes that occurred before the arrival of Europeans can be averaged-out. For
this reason it is a useful tool with which to compare the radiocarbon dates
from archaeological activity in other places as it, essentially, provides a ‘null hypothesis’. To a
large extent, it allows us to say, all other factors being equal, what would
the distribution of radiocarbon dates look like? – the only factor that really
influences this distribution is the exponential decay of datable material. This
expresses itself in a graph that shows lots of recent radiocarbon dates, with
somewhat fewer further back in time, and fewer and fewer as one travels further
and further into the past. As McLaughlin says: ‘this decay channel is provided
by erosion and diagenesis allows you to see this exponential decay.’ Such a
null hypothesis allows us to apply statistical tests to some of the apparent
patterns in the Irish archaeological record. McLaughlin explained that he
fitted an exponential decay function on the available northern European data
set and compared it to the Irish evidence. Although not many pits, relatively
speaking, have been dated they are more robust against the research interests
and biases of individual archaeologists and institutions. His graph indicates that
there are vastly more radiocarbon dates from the Early Neolithic than what one
would expect under the null hypothesis. McLaughlin describes the increase in
radiocarbon dates in the Late Neolithic as ‘a wiggly line’ that increases
gradually and at approximately the same rate as the null hypothesis line. It
markedly increases at around 3300 cal BC. He argues that this may be explained
in terms of there being another immigration into Ireland around 3300 cal BC.
Presumably there was an immigration of some form at the start of the Irish
Neolithic and there was another one in the time after 3000 cal BC. He sees
these as being characterised by the movement of a significant number of people.
This would have been at a time when the great passage tombs like Knowth were
still in use, leading him to the vastly understated remark that ‘this must have
been an interesting time to live.’ After this point, the radiocarbon signal
increases gradually. He sees that there may have been successive waves of
people, each bringing with them new technologies, languages, and religious
ideologies, but in terms of the absolute rate of archaeological deposition –
the number of sites, and ultimately, the number of people – there do not appear
to be too many changes after 3000 cal BC. In a prodigious feat of ‘blue sky
thinking’ he attempts to turn all this data into hard figures of population. He
notes the development-led excavations have discovered Early Neolithic
rectangular houses at almost the same rate as we know the surviving pattern of
Early Christian ringforts.
There are approximately 60,000 ringforts known from the island of Ireland and
using this as a very crude analogue, he suggests that there were once the same
number of Early Neolithic houses. From the radiocarbon evidence we can say,
with a great degree of certainty, that each of those houses lasted for between
one to five generations. If we put a number out of mid-air (or swag) and say
that there were 10 people at every site, we get a population in Ireland in the
period from 3750 cal BC and 3600 cal BC of 120,000 to 600,000 people. To put
this in context, he suggests that the landscape was almost as heavily populated
in the Early Neolithic as the modern Irish countryside of, say, Tyrone. McLaughlin
argues that, in many respects, this makes an awful lot of sense. He notes that
he once calculated that, given the density of the primeval Neolithic forest, it
would have required every man, woman, and child to cut down trees at a rate of
only one every week to clear the entire island within that 150 year period. In
the Early part of the Middle Neolithic or the transition from the Early to
Middle Neolithic (3600 cal BC to 3400 cal BC) there are three times the number
of pit deposition sites as there are Early Neolithic houses. However, he
suggests that fewer people are responsible for each site as these are simple
holes in the ground in comparison to the more complex rectangular structures.
Also, Bayesian modelling indicates that these sites were in uses from around
four to eight human generations. Extrapolating from all these limits and caveats, suggests a population of
between 100,000 and 200,000 people. In the Middle Neolithic proper, during the
period of the Passage tombs, we just don’t know what the population would have
been like as we simply do not have the identified settlement sites. If we
accept – even for a few moments – the huge assumption that they became nomadic pastoralists,
anthropological studies indicate that the average group size would have been in
the region of 40 to 150 people. If we then make the simple-minded (McLaughlin’s
term) assumption that there was a one-to-one relationship between Passage tombs
and kin groups … and there were approximately 150 tombs … we get a population
of only 6,000 to 23,000 people in Ireland at this time. Although there are more caveats than you can shake a dirty
trowel at, McLaughlin is firm in his assertion that the population was markedly
smaller than in the Early Neolithic. He sees them as completely different
societies that have nothing in common other than the fact that we today call
them both Neolithic. In the Late Neolithic the rate of pit deposition is approximately
that of the period from 3600 cal BC to 3400 cal BC, if we factor in the
exponential decay of radiocarbon dates. Thus, he estimates that the Late
Neolithic population was in the range from 50,000 to 100,000 people. While
there are more sites of Beaker and Early Bronze Age date, what McLaughlin terms
the ‘taphonomic correction’ again suggests a population of between 50,000 to
100,000 people.

McLaughlin stresses that the act of gathering
together all the data from the available archaeological excavation literature
allows incredible new insights into past lives and activities, particularly when those things happened. While it
sounds simplistic, he is keen to stress that this form of research is actually
a radical departure in modern archaeology. While there has been so much good
research and theoretical discourse about, for example, what grooved ware meant
to the people who created it, or how the landscape was encountered by the
agriculturalists, or how and why power and communities were transformed at the
start of the Bronze Age, this new wealth of data allows us to ask questions
about the realities of domestic life in prehistory that could not even have
been framed a decade ago. He sees this as a direct result of the boom in
development-led archaeology that has created a ‘data set that is almost the
best resolved in the wide world.’

Returning to the opening analogy of the planet
Saturn, McLaughlin notes that we still do not know where on this ‘scale of
knowledge’ we currently are. He says: ‘We’ve built the telescope – we have
radiocarbon dating – we’ve amassed knowledge about the distant past at a rate
that was unimaginable a few years ago. What we don’t know though is have we resolved the Cassini Division? Can we
see surface detail on the surface of Saturn? Or are we still being foiled
by what we don’t understand about the structures? I would like to think we are
somewhere in between Huygens and Cassini. And soon, if I were to come back in
maybe five years’ time, and present again, we will have a much better resolved
idea of what is going on.’ McLaughlin has amassed a total of 1206 radiocarbon
dates from Ulster but, he argues, there should
be ten to one-hundred times that number. He argues that there is little point
anymore in excavating archaeological features if they are not going to be
radiocarbon dated. Citing Bayliss et al.
(2007), he notes that ‘a date is just a number and a radiocarbon date is just
an expensive number’ … but McLaughlin goes beyond this to argue that ‘an archaeological
feature without a radiocarbon date is just an expensive hole in the ground’. He
believes that excavation resources should be weighted in favour of
understanding chronology, because it is only an understanding of chronology
that leads to a true understanding of the past. He concludes that what has been
discovered so far is remarkable, but improvements are definitely needed.
Commercial archaeological companies must produce more radiocarbon dates, they
must take better samples [you’ll find no argument from me on this one! here | here
| here],
in particular we need to date more ‘ordinary’ pits and not just the ‘juicy’
features!

With that, the lecture ended and the floor was
thrown open to a variety of questions and a hearty round of applause and
profuse thanks to the speaker. Regular readers of this blog will know that I’ve
made my views on the value (or otherwise) offered by the commercial archaeology
sector (at least in Northern Ireland) exceedingly clear. Rather than bore you
all with a rehash of my arguments, I’ll direct the reader in search of a
counterpoint to here.
Even though Rowan is coming at the utility of the commercial sector to enhance
our shared knowledge from a totally opposite direction (he sees the doughnut,
I’m looking at the hole), he still reaches the conclusion that what we’ve got
to work with is much less than we should have. As he notes above, we should
have vastly more radiocarbon dates from Irish sites – in the range of two
orders of magnitude. Leaving those kinds of questions aside, we must turn to
the archaeological insights he provides and ask if he’s right. I have no doubt
that McLaughlin is – in the long run – going to be proven wrong about most of
his points. As he says, our understanding may well be somewhere in between
Huygens and Cassini, but that fails to countenance the modern images of Saturn
taken from Hubble. Please, don’t believe that this is in any way a criticism of
Rowan’s work – it’s exactly the opposite! If future researchers see further and
understand deeper, they will only have done it through standing on the
shoulders of Rowan – and those like him – who are constantly pushing the
boundaries of our knowledge of chronology. One way or another, when McLaughlin
speaks, he’s certainly worth listening to!

I am grateful to Rowan for having a read over this
post and helping correct a number of errors and for providing clarification on a number of points. However, any that remain are mine
alone. Rowan has also been kind enough to provide me with two of the images from his presentation, for which he has my sincere thanks.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

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European Heritage Open
Days 2013 | An East Belfast Experience | Part I

If you’re interested in
what may be broadly termed ‘heritage issues’, you are probably familiar with
European Heritage Open Days, where buildings of historic worth, which are not
generally publicly accessible, are open for one weekend in September. This year
the EOHD event in Northern Ireland were boasting of ‘410 properties and events … opening for free on Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th September’. Regular
readers of this blog may just recall my attempts to get out and see some of
these on my doorstep in 2012. In terms of the number of properties I got it
see, it was an unmitigated disaster as I got to see just one building. However,
it was a pretty special one: Parliament Buildings at Stormont, the seat of our
Legislative Assembly.

This year I promised
myself that I’d do better. This year I’d get my children enthused and excited
and we’d see some cool stuff! Saturday 14th September came round and
I was excited! Turns out I was pretty much alone in my exhilaration,
anticipation, and eagerness as there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm from
Chapples Minors. Undeterred, I set forth alone with my EOHD guide book open to
the East Belfast pages. Purely on the basis of the fact that I’d not really
known anything about Netherleigh House, I decided I’d head there first.
Netherleigh is today the headquarters of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment. It was originally built around 1875 as the family home of
William Robertson. He was the Robertson of the well-known Belfast merchant
group Robertson, Ledlie, and Ferguson, owners of the Belfast landmark Bank Building. While original plans do not appear to survive, the design of the
mansion is, on stylistic grounds, attributed to the architectural firm Lanyon, Lynn, and Lanyon. In particular, the design is attributed to William Henry Lynn, based on similarities between the detailing at Netherleigh and other
examples of his work, for example at Hill Head House, Ballymena, and Belfast
Castle. Examples of these similarities include the swept chimney stack caps,
the pierced balustrade above the entrance, and the decorative fluting on the
oak shutter boards. The Robertson family appear to have lived at Netherleigh
until around 1905/6, when it was bought by the Reid family. By 1921 the house
was the property of Lt-Col. Samuel Hall-Thompson. Hall-Thompson held a number
of political offices including Member of Parliament for Belfast Clifton from
1929 to 1953, and was Minister of Education from 1944 to 1950. Hall-Thompson
sold Netherleigh to the adjacent Campbell College in 1929. From then until
Campbell was evacuated to the relative safety of Portrush in 1941, Netherleigh
functioned as a junior boarding house for the school. From the evacuation of
the school until 1946 the house was occupied by HM Government as part of the
war effort, and was used as a convalescent hospital for American officers. The
guide tells a story of one officer who took his own life by hanging himself
above the back stair, giving the house its resident ghost. In 1946 several
temporary Nissen huts were erected in what is now the visitor car park. As is
the way of such temporary structures, they remained in place until coming to
the attention of an arsonist in 1974. The Ministry of Education took possession
of the house in January 1947, and it remained in use as their headquarters
until June 1962 when they moved to the Dundonald House on the Stormont Estate.
There is a delightful story of Hall-Thompson, the former owner of Netherleigh,
returning as Minister of Education, only to find that his new office was his
old bedroom. After the Ministry of Education moved out in 1962, the property
remained vacant until 1966 when it was used by The Old Campbellian Society as their Sports Club. They sold the premises to the current occupants in
1974, and construction on the present-day complex began in 1976. Unfortunately,
the house did not receive Listed Buildings status until 1986, by which time
parts of it had been demolished, including the ballroom, joined to the main
house by an enclosed, covered walkway, along with the kitchens and servant’s
quarters. Similarly, the original outhouses and an extremely large glasshouse
were also demolished. Today the house is what one would expect from a working
government building – clean, modern office furniture, hard-wearing carpets, and
‘fire door – keep closed’ signs screwed onto historic oak doors.

Original front entrance to Netherleigh House. Note the pierced balustrade over the portico and the swept chimney stack caps.

Note the fluting on the oak shutter board, a characteristic of the work of architect William Henry Lynn.

Anteroom directly inside the small entrance hallway. It still retains its oak panelling, shutter, arched recess and fireplace. To retain the symmetrical appearance of the room, the door on the left of the back room is false.

If you look closely, you’ll see that this is the same room as before, but how it was in the 1920s. I love the idea (but not the practice) of the two skin rugs – the Bengal Tiger and the Polar Bear as symbols of the reach of empire. It’s, perhaps, a bit cluttered for my taste, but it’s certainly more vibrant than what it is today.

Reception room with original fireplace surviving. The roundel at the top includes the initials WJR, for William Robertson, the original owner.

The same room as it was in the 1920s – sadly, all those beautiful book cases and display cabinets are gone now.

The main staircase

The main
stairwell is built in oak and surrounded on all sides by well-made oak
panelling. Originally, this was polished and must have gleamed like anything.
Unfortunately, some boorish jobsworth decided that it was a fire hazard and
that removing it would give the occupants an extra 30 seconds to escape in the
event of a fire, so it had to go! I don’t want to come across as valuing a building
more than human life, but if we’re going to go down this route, is there really
any point in keeping original features in a listed building? May as well tear
them all down and build soulless, but very safety conscious, cages for us all
instead. The top of the stairs is today blank, but it once held a
classically-inspired sculpture in fibreglass by the remarkably talented Jo Hatty. Unfortunately, it appears not to have been to everyone’s taste and has
been taken down.

The landing at the top of the stairwell is decorated with a series of round-headed arches with cherub roundels in between – another common Lynn motif.

The stairwell is lit by this beautiful gabled rectangular lantern light, decorated with foliage and swagging.

A conference room as it is today …

... and as it was back in the 1920s

Overall, I’m afraid that visiting Netherleigh was both
beautiful and sad. It is wonderful that this house is still in use, still
functioning, and still being cared for. However, it is difficult to cheer too heartily, when you see the photographs of the place in all its Victorian and
Edwardian glory. I know we can’t (and shouldn't) preserve all worthy old piles
in aspic forever, but the shift from the splendid height-of-Empire clutter to
today’s clean lines and business approach seems particularly harsh and jarring.
All that said, it was a lovely experience to get inside the building, workplace
for so many civil servants, but not available to most outside that group.

It was almost 5pm by the time I left Netherleigh and I
despaired for my chances of seeing another building still open at that hour.
Even though I thought it beyond hope, I scanned the pages of the EHOD brochure
and – much to my delight and surprise – found that there was one place still
open! The lovely, wonderful Strand Cinema – now The Strand Arts Centre [Website
| Facebook | Twitter] would be open and giving tours until late in the evening.
The Strand is my local cinema – I’ve seen no end of movies there, but it has
always been as a paying customer, never getting to glimpse behind the scenes.
This was an opportunity I wasn't going to squander.

The Strand is the sole survivor of Belfast’s pre-War
cinemas. It was built in 1935 and was originally operated by
the Union Cinemas Group. Before its construction, this was the site of
Strandtown House, the home of Gustav Heyn, founder of both the Headline Shipping Company and Belfast Steamship Company. The Strand cinema was designed
by John McBride Neill, a local architect who became the foremost cinema
architect in Northern Ireland. Among his creations were the Curzon Cinema on
the Ormeau Road, and the Majestic Cinema, on the Lisburn Road. Neill’s short
biography on the Dictionary of Irish Architects website is worth reading, if
for no other reason than creating the opportunity to encounter this line: ‘A
bachelor, he retired when he was sixty, freeing himself to indulge in
Continental travel, music, sailing and making model aeroplanes’ – sounds like a
great way to spend your days! Very Art Deco in style and inspiration, the
Strand incorporated elements inspired by the nearby Harland and Wolff
shipyards, including curved walls and portholes in the foyer. There are also
portholes in one of the ground floor screens that were intended to be backlit
and give the impression that the audience was aboard an ocean liner – itself a
very ‘deco’ theme.

When it opened, on the
7th of December 1935, its first feature film was Bright Eyes,
starring the late Shirley Temple. If you know only one thing about Shirley Temple, it’s
probably that she sang the song ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’ – this is the movie
it appeared it. Bright Eyes also won Temple an Oscar – the first ever given to
a child, for her portrayal of Shirley Blake. Finally, if you do watch the movie,
you may feel that you recognise ‘Rags’ the dog – this is Terry who played
numerous canine roles in her career, but none more famous than Toto in The
Wizard of Oz.

In October 1937 Union Cinemas Group were
taken over by Associated British Cinemas (ABC), who ran the Strand until 1983
when it closed. From the following year until 1986 the theatre functioned as a
live performance venue for musical events and cabaret. After a brief hiatus, it
reopened in 1988 as a four screen cinema. In part, this was achieved through
dividing the main auditorium horizontally into two with the main screen serving
what had been the balcony and a smaller screen serving the stalls. The Strand
underwent major renovations in 1999 to restore and maintain it’

Totally Hollywood carpets – specially commissioned for the Strand in the 1980s.

Screen 2 with its 14ft deep stage from the days it was used as a concert venue. The porthole theme can just be glimpsed in the circular windows of the emergency exits, to the right of the stage.

Projector system for Screen 3.

The master projectionist at work, queuing up the next feature presentation.

35mm film stock of trailers that has to be manually spliced onto the front of every new movie – but soon to be a thing of the past.

The last hurrah!: containers of film waiting to be returned to distributors after their runs have completed, again once the cinema goes digital this will be a thing of the past.

My good friend the projectionist keeping notes between showings.Note the Tipp-Ex marks on the wall left by projectionists who occasionally used it to mark where the advertising rolls met the main body of the film, or where individual smaller reels of film were spliced together to make the single large show reel. This was done to ensure ease of finding the join between the two, as they had to be separated back into their smaller components at the end of the run.

A cinematic archive – twenty years of movie posters.

A movie rewinding in the much more spacious Screen 1 projection booth.

When the tour was over
and the rest of our small tour group had dispersed, I was lucky enough to be
invited up into the projection booth for Screen 1. This was the original
projection booth from the building’s days as a single-screen venue and gives a
much better idea of how the original cinema would have looked and felt. While
the various projection machines are not the original 1930s examples, they are
quite ancient in their own right. This presents a significant problem as the
company who manufactured them went out of business in the 1960s, and sourcing
spare parts is becoming increasingly difficult. Added to this are the manifold
pressures of doing business in the modern world. For example, distributers are
retreating from the difficulty and cost of producing physical prints of movies and
the public are increasingly wooed by the large multi-screen theatres with the
latest in 3D technology, and all the hallmarks of the modern cinema experience.
It may lack the character of a place like the Strand, but you can’t argue with
the economics of the situation. For this reason the Strand cinema has
transformed itself into a not-for-profit cinema and arts centre. Part of their
programme includes bringing back live music acts, specialist cinema events,
along with talent nights, and a variety of stage and screen classes. From a
heritage aspect, it’s fantastic to see the building being kept alive and the
business continuing to thrive. As part of this drive to keep abreast of
modernity and maintain marketplace relevance, the cinemas are themselves going
digital and that, unfortunately, means the loss of the current projection
system. I’m told that one will be retained for display and that another may be
kept operational for occasional use on special occasions. The new system will
merely involve the plugging in of a computer hard drive. I’m sure an older
generation lamented the arrival of the ‘talkies’ and colour and felt that
mechanised projectors diluted the warmth and charm of proper, old-school,
cinema – when they did away with the hand cranked variety. Still, it is
difficult not to feel a sadness at the end of this particular era. As I am
writing this piece (November 2013) they’re all gone - the Strand is digital
now! The photographs I publish here must be among the last – if not the very
last – records of the cinema as it was. Splicing 35mm film with a hand cutter
and sticky tape is over. Breaking it back down from a full-movie show reel into
individual reels for transport is done. Goodbye. I feel truly honoured that I
managed to make this ‘last chance to see’ event and provide some record of its
passing. For all my sadness at seeing it go, I’m delighted that this beautiful
Art Deco building is still in existence and still doing well as a cinema – may
you continue to show great movies and may you continue to be a vibrant part of
living in East Belfast!

Well, that was how I
spent my Saturday. In the next part, I discuss the other heritage sites we got
to see and how I bribed and cajoled my children into accompanying me.

Notes:

I am indebted to all
the people who worked so hard to make European Heritage Open Days 2013 such a
success in Northern Ireland, especially the tour guides who took such time and
effort explaining their buildings to the public. I am also indebted to those
who provided photocopied guides to the various buildings. I have shamelessly
reproduced much of their knowledge and research here, though I make no claims
to ownership of the material – without it this post would have been a much
poorer piece! Thank you all.

If I could be permitted
to make a direct appeal to the owners of the Strand, I’d beg them to lose the
psychic – I feel my stress levels rise every time I drive by and see the signs up, heralding the prospect of another charlatan scamming the public. Seriously – they’re not
real! No matter how much it is dressed up as ‘just a bit of fun’ and ‘what harm
can it do?’ they are often playing with the emotions of vulnerable people,
looking for hope and solace. At the kindest level, these are delusional people
who believe that they can speak to spirits; but at their worst they are thieves and confidence tricksters who steal money and hope. What would I suggest you
use to fill the space? Well – not them for a start. If pushed, I’d prefer to
see the psychics replaced with physics – something along the line of the
wonderful Royal Society Christmas Lectures (check out any of these videos). It
could be brilliant! Crowds would flock from all corners to see that! Any
Northern Irish town with more than a pub and a pump to its name can probably
boast of the appearance of some peripatetic fake psychic. But a good speaker
about science? Where would you find one of those for your entertainment? It’d
be nigh on unique. I’d be the first in the queue with my kids for every new
show and I’m willing to bet that plenty of other people would too! All done!
End of slightly ‘ranty’ plea! Sorry … I just don’t like psychics!